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BBC Derides Pizzagate as Fake News

The mainstream media doth protest too much.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have each published stories debunking “pizzagate“, an online independent investigation that points to circumstantial evidence of a pedophile ring involving Democratic party members and centered on a Washington D.C, pizza restaurant. Much of the initial evidence touted by pizzagate researchers has been derived from the John Podesta Wikileaks.

The BBC has joined with the New York Times and Washington Post in rejecting the findings of pizzagate researchers as “fake news” in an article “The saga of ‘Pizzagate’: The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread.”

The problem with circumstantial evidence to prove a theory is that each piece of evidence can be easily refuted and missing pieces of evidence can undermine the entire theory. Finding the existence of a door, some chairs and an open field doesn’t mean one has found an ancient stadium. Add more pieces of circumstantial evidence ( a specific location, historical writing, etc) and one can be more certain of an archaeological find.

The BBC article patently rejects ‘pizzagate” as false and a conspiracy theory. The BBC notes holes in the story without presenting the mountains of circumstantial evidence that independent researchers have found. Rather, the BBC points to the fact that no investigation has been launched. By that we suppose they mean no “official investigation”. The independent researchers are indeed conducting an “investigation”. The lack of an official investigation of a crime is not evidence that one has not been committed.

The BBC also notes that the owner of the pizza shop that is the center of the controversy has “never met Clinton“. Meeting Clinton is not a prerequisite to proving pizzagate. President Obama, the BBC fails to mention in its article, has visited the pizza restaurant at the center of pizzagate. That fact itself proves nothing.

Meeting or not meeting the owner of the pizza restaurant proves nothing. Yet, the BBC’s main contention that pizzagate is fake is that Ms. Clinton never met the pizza restaurant’s owner, while failing, however, to mention that researchers have found a letter from Ms. Clinton to the restaurant owner, which by itself proves nothing.

Hence, the BBC refutes the pizzagate theory using the same methodology the pizzagate researchers use to “prove’ their theory.

The BBC’s conclusion that pizzagate is fake is based on referencing missing evidence and making inferences regarding its own circumstantial evidence. The BBC has therefore put together an incomplete set of facts and inferences from those facts or missing facts to disprove a theory.

It seems, however, that the independent researchers have spent more time assembling circumstantial evidence to construct their theory than the BBC, NY Times and Washington Post have spent refuting it.